


Doubt

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: Thor doubts his brother's love. Loki sets him straight.





	Doubt

When the dust settled, all eyes fell on the gauntlet.

“I’m meant to take it,” Thor said.

His face was smooth and tired. No joy or anger in it. No real desire. And the tone of his voice was almost one of surprise.

Stark was the only one who was skeptical, but Rogers and Vision shot him a look the second he opened his mouth so he shut it again straight away. The hammer still answered Thor, so Tony could hardly argue.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine you’d keep it,” Loki said, as he and Thor strode up the bifrost and back toward the city. Loki’s voice had dropped to a whisper with his excitement and he was leaning close, rapping his fingertips against the golden glove on Thor’s hand, staring at the stones that glowed in their settings.

In the soothingly airy privacy of Thor’s room, Loki was effervescent, raving about the endless possibilities that awaited them in the gems. Wrongs to right. Tricks to play. Things to see.

But Thor’s face was blank. It had been so every time Loki had looked at it. Blank at his reappearance. Blank throughout the battle. Blank while wielding the most powerful weapon in all the realms.

“By the nine, brother, you are as sore a winner as you are a loser,” Loki laughed. “My death was hardly the first time I’ve deceived you--certainly won’t be the last. Now you’ve won the game--and I do mean the game, Thor, the one for all the marbles--and you look like someone’s just killed your dog. What’s the matter with you? Are you not pleased?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, very,” Thor nodded, still wearing an expression that in no way aligned with the words.

“With the outcome, or with me?” Loki asked, dropping down to sit on Thor’s bed with a bounce and neatly folding himself up to sit cross-legged.

“Yes--both,” Thor answered.

“You haven’t smiled once since I’ve been back.”

“No?” Thor asked, distracted, taking a knife from his belt and cutting off the upper quarter of a taper candle. “Sorry. I’m sure I’ll be able to manage it again in time.”

Loki stared as Thor put the shortened candle back in its stick and set it on the floor. Thor’s face was still flat and his motions were easy. Almost careless. The way someone moves when they’re alone and unobserved.

“Is it Mother?” Loki asked quietly.

“Not exactly.”

“What then, exactly?”

“I feel ungrateful for it,” Thor replied, and seemed to try to send his words away with a shake of his head.

“Thor.”

“It’s only,” Thor began, pushing his hair back the way he often did when he knew the answer but disliked it. “I didn’t think something through.”

“Nothing new there,” Loki breezed, light and teasing. He dragged his boots off, dropped them to the floor, and sat flapping his toes. “Why is it a problem this time?”

“I hoped for this,” Thor said, nodding, and the ghost of a smile glided across his face. “For you to still be breathing,” he clarified. “More than anything. Prayed that your death was just another trick. In every daydream it was all I could think about. And wish granted, thank goodness. Couldn’t bear to lose you.”

“I don’t understand,” Loki said, squinting and shaking his head, staring at Thor’s eyes, which were trained on the unlit candle on the floor. “What’s wrong?”

“It just didn’t occur to me that the trick would mean…”

“That you’d have to kill me to keep your word,” Loki finished.

“What?” Thor breathed, and his face folded up in confusion for a fraction of a second before he remembered. "Oh, no, I don’t give a damn about my word on that count. Not sure I care much for words in general,” he murmured, then sent his armor away and pulled his tunic over his head.

Loki could see the little white line in Thor’s side where his knife had slid in. He told himself it was the imperfection that allowed the rest of Thor to be perfect, but he’d seen Thor without it, and knew better than to believe himself.

"What then?” Loki snapped, trying not to snarl and only half succeeding.

“Only I didn’t count on it breaking my heart,” Thor shrugged, then took off his boots and the rest of his clothes and went to the font to bathe.

“Oh, I see,” Loki whispered, unable to coax his vocal chords into action and instead shaping the words with his lips, teeth, and tongue. “So you’ve stopped loving me at last. Odin would be so proud.”

“No,” Thor said. “No, of course not. Norns, you really are a fool, aren’t you? No, I’ll always love you, Loki,” Thor laughed, though his face was turned and Loki realized it could as easily have been a sob. “No, I just didn’t realize the lie would mean that you’d stopped loving me.”

“What?” Loki sputtered.

Thor was moving smoothly through his washing now. Unshaken. Accustomed to thoughts like these and to realities that were even worse.

“No, Thor it wasn’t about you-”

“Yes, I know,” Thor nodded, running a wet cloth down his left calf. “That’s it exactly. You didn’t consider me at all. Just used my love for you like you always do. Used my grief to get your way. Left me alone to deal with… everything. It was very clever. Well played. I hope you got whatever it was you wanted.”

There was a note of bitterness creeping into Thor’s tone. Thor seemed to catch it too and shook himself, letting the tension out of his body with a slow breath before continuing on a fresh one.

“I really am glad to have you back,” Thor said softly. “Whole and breathing. Glad isn’t a strong enough word.”

Thor draped the cloth over the edge of the font and crossed the room. He took a razor from a drawer and crouched in front of the candle. Loki saw a line of blood well up on the top of Thor’s forearm where the edge of the blade had been drawn. Thor let the drops fall onto the candle, soaking into the wick and dripping down the sides, streaking them with red.

“You know to let the flame go out on its own,” Thor said, and Loki blinked. “I should only be gone a quarter of an hour or so. Don’t let anyone into the room, not that I expect anyone to come. If you wouldn’t mind making it a bit colder in here, I’d appreciate it. Especially around my head. I’ll keep better.”

Then Thor stretched out on his back beside the taper, lit it with a tiny spark of lightning, and went limp on the stone floor. The stink of burning blood reached Loki’s nose a second later.

Loki only realized his legs were trembling when he fell to his hands and knees as he tried to leave the bed. With no one to see and no reason to risk walking, he crawled to the center of the room and knelt on the rough stones beside his brother.

Loki squeezed Thor’s hand. The muscles, bones, and tendons rolled in his grip, but made no movements of their own. The gauntlet had vanished. Thor had been wearing it all through his washing and while trimming the candle. Loki could have sworn it was still on when Thor was cutting his arm.

He looked around the room but couldn’t see it on top of the dresser or the table. There was nowhere else Thor could have set the thing down. He’d be furious when he woke up. Would think Loki had stolen it.

Loki cast a spell to keep anyone from leaving and then cast another to reveal anyone who might be hiding. It only showed the bats and spiders that slept in the dark corners near the floor and ceiling.

“Thor, wake up,” Loki whispered, leaning close to Thor’s ear. “I think someone’s been in your rooms.”

There was no motion in Thor’s throat. No tiny undulation of the flesh above the veins. No quiet gust of breath from Thor’s mouth or nose.

Loki’s hands gripped Thor’s shoulders and started shaking them before his mind caught up with itself and repeated Thor’s words.

Ice branched out from Loki’s arms, forming a low hut above Thor’s body and a crown around his head.

This sort of seidr was not something Loki expected from his brother, so he’d been blind to it even though it was an old and obvious spell.

It was precise magic. Not complicated, exactly. It simply had requirements that were often impossible to meet. You needed a reliable flame, and sometimes someone to tend it. You needed your own blood, which would burn your life away when you lit the fire and then release you from death when the flame sputtered out. Easy enough. But the rest was more difficult. To visit the dead, you had to know they’d let your soul go again--unless you had no interest in returning. It was a tricky thing to guarantee, since you couldn’t ask them in advance. You needed blood from the person you intended to visit, which was hard to acquire from someone who was gone. Loki hadn’t seen Thor use any blood but his own during the spell and he wasn’t sure what that might mean. And, finally, you needed to have been properly dead yourself at some point. Valhalla brooked no tourists: you had to have called it home, however briefly, at least once in your life. Loki hadn’t been certain until this moment: Thor had indeed been killed by the blow from the destroyer.

There was no doubt that Thor was dead now. The wound on his arm was not bleeding. His skin felt like soft leather with thick cotton stuffing behind it. It had grown cold quickly with Loki’s ice, and was reminiscent of furniture from a mountain cabin that had no fire in its stove. And Thor looked wrong. His color had drained. His muscles were all slack. Now there was truly no expression on his face, and the blank look he’d worn earlier seemed animated in comparison. His lips were pale and parted. His eyes were half open and unfocused. The pupils were wide and unresponsive. Loki shut the eyelids with his fingertips and cast a weak spell to keep them in place until Thor’s will was working in them again.

Loki stared at the candle, watching the wax as it dripped and sank, worried that somehow it might never go out.

When the taper got very low, Loki switched to watching Thor, waiting for the first signs of life’s return. He wondered whether it would come quietly or with thrashing. All the while he unconsciously prayed aloud, saying stay with me, stay with me, stay with me.

First there was a blink. Then Thor’s mouth closed. He drew a slow breath. He tried to move but was blocked by Loki’s ice. Moved a bit more forcefully and made all the ice shatter. Stared at Loki’s face. At the frost fractals that spiraled out below the inner corners of the eyes, flashing silver against a backdrop of indigo.

“Lo, you’ll get heat cramps and then worse if you don’t shift soon,” Thor reminded gently, and Loki’s skin went from blue to eggshell.

“The gauntlet’s gone.”

“Yes,” Thor said, and slowly sat up. Loki scrambled to his feet, bent to take Thor’s hands, and hauled his brother up from the floor.

"Yes?” Loki echoed, baffled.

“Yes, I gave it to Mother,” Thor replied, slowly walking over to the bed, then dropping down on it like a sack of flour.

That explained how Thor could trust his host to return his spirit to the realms of the living.

“But where did you get her blood? And when did you put it on the candle?”

“It’s in my veins.”

Loki’s eyelids fluttered and he nodded once, staring through gathering tears at the back of his brother’s head. The blond hair longer, darker, and wavier every year. Always more like their mother’s.

“Did she teach you this magic?”

“Who else?”

“When?”

“Um,” Thor sighed, and rolled onto his back to stretch his ribs, arching them up into the air before deflating again to land against the bedding with a fluffy thud. “We started practicing about three years ago,” Thor said, seeming surprised by his own response, alarmed by the inconsistency of time’s weight and speed. “Back then she was sending me to see her father. I’m fairly certain she knew what was coming--and when it was this spell she wanted to teach me, I suspected it too. One day she told me to make sure I got the gauntlet. Said I had to deliver it to her at any cost. That, if necessary, she’d reimburse me once she had it. She was...” Thor shook his head.

“She was what?” Loki coaxed.

“Adamant,” Thor said, his face pleased and awed. “It was such a relief to see her like that. In over a thousand years, she’d never demanded anything of me until that moment. She’d always been so selfless. Too selfless. No one ever deserved to make a demand and have it met more than she did.”

“I’ll drink the sea to that,” Loki said. “And how is she?” Loki breathed, half hoping Thor wouldn’t hear, or would ignore it if he had.

“She’s as well as anyone could ever hope to be.”

“Right,” Loki choked, mouth hanging open briefly after the word. “Silly of me.”

“It takes a lot of getting used to,” Thor soothed.  

“So you’ve been to see her before? Not just grandfather?”

“Yes. I had to practice carrying something with me so I’d be able to give her the gauntlet. That was the hardest part.”

“What did you practice with?”

“Mjolnir.”

“Stupid question,” Loki breathed, and bit his lips between his teeth to keep from asking another.

He lightly pressed Thor’s toes and fingertips against his palm and found them warm. But, overall, Thor still seemed off. Dead tired. Heavy but empty. Strangely far away.

“Wouldn’t a trip to the healers be wise at this point?” Loki asked.

“Probably,” Thor admitted.

“Shall we, then?” Loki asked, raising his eyebrows expectantly and offering his arm.

“In a moment,” Thor sighed. “They try my patience on the best of days. To be fair, I try theirs too. But it’s so much harder when I’ve just come from her and Valhalla.”

Loki tried to conceive of the depth of such a letdown. To leave paradise and return to a rotting body and a wretched brother. To leave Frigga and lose her again. Trade perfection for flaws. Abandon immortality for pain, illness, and death. Loki supposed that if Thor seemed dead it was no wonder. Death was what life was. You didn’t get one without the other.

“What’s she like now?” Loki murmured, and Thor narrowed his eyes, searching for the words.

“She’s... more,” Thor said, and shook his head at the inadequacy of the answer. "Everything. I know that’s impossible to imagine. She was always so much.”

“Does she find it difficult to let you go?”

“No, I find it difficult to keep from begging her to hold me there.”

Loki cleaned the razor and put it away. He took a slow, childish pleasure in picking wax off the floor with his fingernails. Set the candlestick back on the table. Burned Thor’s blood away where it had dripped on the stone.

Half an hour later, Thor swung to his feet. Loki draped a robe over his shoulders, but Thor didn’t bother to put it on properly.

The healers frowned when they saw the brothers. Loki suspected the expressions were for very different reasons.

“Have you done it again?” Sylvi asked Thor.

“Aye.”

“You’re going to break your mother’s heart,” she scolded.

Loki heard Thor take a deep breath, hold it for a count of ten, and slowly let it out again. He wondered who the healers believed his brother had been visiting. Odin, probably. They were most likely assuming Thor was seeking the late Allfather’s advice on how to rule. Loki found it troubling that they didn’t realize Thor knew better than Odin already. It must have been odd for them to have a king who was young enough to be their son. But he was Frigga’s son. That should have counted for much among them.

Loki began to understand Thor’s reluctance to seek out healing. He paid careful attention to what they did to Thor. Not much. Thor’s body was doing most of the job for them. They closed up the slash in his arm so neatly it couldn’t be seen and they gave him a golden apple, but that was it. It was all seidr that Loki could work on his own. In the future, if necessary, he would spare Thor the trip and spare their mother the ignorant insults.

Thor slept again after that. Loki sat at the foot of the bed, reading and listening to Thor’s breathing. It was almost like hearing the surf from a distance. Soothing and hypnotic. It made time race and allowed the writer’s words to flow so smoothly that it felt as if the thoughts they conveyed were Loki’s own.

At dusk, the bats flew down from Thor’s rafters and shot out the window to catch their breakfast. Thor left to dine with his friends. There was always tension if Loki joined him. Loki enjoyed that. It was almost satisfying to make Thor’s friends squirm. They struggled to remain civil to him, hoping to spare Thor more misery when, really, all they wanted was to tear Loki apart and leave him for the dogs. It struck Loki as being simultaneously honest and dishonest. A strange inner war waged between their love for Thor and their hatred for Loki. One in which the former always won.

When Thor got back, Loki handed him a bottle of a favorite wine and they went out to sit on the balcony railing. They swung their legs in the night air as they drank and gazed up at the heavens. The sky possessed that spilled, wet look of watercolors. The nebulae above were so saturated with nascent stars they glowed like lamps in fog. Loki tossed a gold piece up over their heads and the brothers watched as the bats came to circle it, investigating the coin and deeming it worthless.

“Is there nothing here now that’s worth coming back for?” Loki asked, peering at Thor’s long face from the corner of his eye.

“There’s you to worry about. And work to do. Pain I can prevent, perhaps. And she doesn’t want me dead yet. I don’t like to disappoint her.”

Loki nodded and reached toward his brother, fluttering his fingers to ask for Thor’s bottle. They swapped. Loki’s wine was sweet and sticky, meant as a dessert in itself; Thor’s was dry and earthy, reminiscent somehow of falling asleep by the fireside. Each one tasted more intense when alternated in this way. Every few sips, the brothers switched, hearing the squeaky ring of fingers against increasingly empty bottles and the weakening slosh of the depleting wine inside.

The breeze against their cheeks promised a warm dawn. A day for swimming in streams and reading in the shade of willows.

“Then is there no joy left in birdsong and the wind in the trees?” Loki asked.

“I’ve been the birdsong and the wind in the trees.”

Loki’s bottle slipped from his hand and hit his knee. Thor caught it on the bounce and took another swig.

“Sorry,” Thor sighed. “I’m still feeling stung. It’s always hardest when I’ve just come back. But it fades a bit in time.”

“What’s it like when the shock wears off?”

“It’s,” Thor began, then huffed, shook his head, and sat thinking a moment. “It isn’t that there’s no pleasure left in lovely things. Only that the proportions have changed. I’ve seen so much--been so much. Too much, probably. I feel like I’m shut up inside a tiny cage when I’m here now. There I feel boundless.”

“Then I was right,” Loki marveled. “Freedom is life’s great lie if you can only reach it afterward.”

Thor’s eyes shined in the dark and he was shaking. His shoulder rubbed against Loki’s own as his laughter rose higher. It was a small, young sound, surprising in someone so large and so old. Their mother’s laugh. The one that happened whenever Loki had said something wicked and she didn’t want to encourage him, but couldn’t pretend it wasn’t funny. Laughter as the loveliest form of failure.

“You’re more like her every day.”

“Thank you,” Thor breathed.

“Thank you,” Loki corrected, and a quiet laugh hit the roof of Thor’s mouth.

Thor’s words and sounds were faint. Modest. But the subtle, shared admission that they both had a favorite felt enormous to Loki.

“You’ve been wearing her colors,” Loki noted, catching the teal silk of Thor’s sleeve between the edges of his fingers and letting it slip through them again.

Blues and greens remained recognizably themselves even by starlight. Warm colors went grey or black in the dark.

“Red feels unlucky to me lately,” Thor admitted. “There’s something too bellicose about it. Obvious. Boastful. Looking strong is one thing. Inviting bloodshed is another.”

When the wine was gone they said their sweet dreams. Loki dissolved into a flock of nighthawks and darted across the gap to the neighboring balcony of his bedroom.

An hour before dawn, Loki leapt back over the divide and landed on Thor’s balcony, then ran inside to perch on the edge of Thor’s bed.

“Were you me?” Loki asked.

Thor leaned up on his elbows and squinted through one eye. Loki had half a dozen lights hovering around his head, having once again forgotten to put them out after he set his book down.

“What?” Thor croaked, curling forward to sit up fully and then running his hands over his face.

“When you were the birdsong and the wind in the trees,” Loki clarified. “Were you me as well?”

“No,” Thor groaned, and dropped back down against the pillow, realizing there was no emergency. “If the dead and the living could mingle freely, there’d be no need for the seidr I did earlier.”

“Then you knew I wasn’t there.”

“Yes, I realized you were still alive quite a while ago.”

“And you don’t know what’s been going on in my head.”

“That’s understating things,” Thor sighed.

Loki grinned and dropped down on the bed beside his brother.

“You look like the cat that got the cream,” Thor grumbled.

“I know something you don’t know.”

“You know lots of things I don’t know.”

“Yes, but this is one you should know because I’ve already told it to you. You’ve just decided to doubt it, which is something I explicitly warned you against.”

“Well, that’s the trouble with being a liar,” Thor yawned.

“True,” Loki conceded.

They both laughed silently, bouncing against the bedding with only the rustle of goosedown to give them away.

“It’s been six years,” Loki whispered, wrapping his arms around Thor’s right bicep and his legs around Thor’s right thigh.

“I know.”

“Sometimes I think everything would have been all right if we could’ve just stayed here like this. The more distance we have between us, the bigger the mess we seem to make in it.”

Thor laughed again. A bouncing shout that ended in a long sigh, content with laughter.

“At this point I’ll try anything,” Thor said.

“Swaddle me and strap me to your back,” Loki offered.

“I don’t know that anyone would even bat an eye anymore.”

Loki hummed against the curve of Thor’s shoulder.

“Six years,” Loki said again, quietly shocked, shaking his head and dragging his lips back and forth across Thor’s skin. “The last time we were in my bed, but lying exactly like this.”

“I remember.”

“Back when you knew better than to doubt that I lo-”

"Don’t.”

“Why not?” Loki asked. “Is it just because I’m a liar?”

“Yes.”

“Fair enough,” Loki admitted. “So you say it.”

“Loki-”

"Say it,” Loki repeated. “And mean it.”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” Loki urged, squeezing Thor’s arm, leaving thin crescent marks in the flesh with his fingernails.

Loki heard Thor’s lungs fill with air. Heard them empty without turning that breath into words. Heard them fill again and then pause.

“Fine. You love me,” Thor said, and Loki wordlessly sobbed against Thor’s shoulder as he frantically nodded his head yes.

They spent a quarter of an hour quietly breathing, letting tensed muscles relax and heartbeats slow. Loki tapped on the inside of Thor’s arm until Thor lifted it up, set it under Loki’s neck, and rolled over to wrap his left arm around Loki too. They fitted themselves together, belly to belly, as they had ever since they were small boys, then fussed with the blankets, tucking them in behind each other’s backs and shoulders.

Loki brushed the tips of their noses together until Thor leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth. With that ice broken, Loki set his lips to Thor’s in a way that was almost cartographic. So softly that the shape of Thor’s mouth was barely altered, and moving in increments so small and methodical they couldn’t miss anything.

When Loki had finished his loop, Thor gave him a firm kiss, centered on the lips, then stared at him with tired eyes and a helpless smile that was, as ever, stronger on the left side of his face. After over a thousand years and a million things, the expression still had the capacity to redden Loki’s cheeks and make his eyebrows lift hopefully.

Loki’s forehead went slack with relief when Thor’s left hand reached down to nudge his right leg up. Thor’s long back meant that he could slip his cock between Loki’s thighs while their faces stayed level for kisses. The pressure of Thor’s palm against the base of Loki’s spine was enough to keep Loki’s cock trapped between their bellies. Deep jaws let them both stretch their mouths open wide.

The ridges on the palate and the peaks of teeth seemed to expand against the tips of their tongues. Breath and wetness were quick to mingle and smoothly blurred their bodies’ borders. Scents and tastes that began as strange soon melted away and vanished into welcome familiarity.

Their mouths did all the things their hips were too tired to do, flowing back and forth, gripping and reaching. The six years they’d spent without each other made this more than enough to lift them up to the top and tip them over its edge. They sagged on the way down, panting against each other’s throats as the room slowly came back into focus. Thor’s pupils were wide, straining to see in the low light. The rest of his face was slightly dazed, but beaming, and his thumb was softly brushing the lower edge of Loki’s bottom lip.

“Crack in the cage door?” Loki asked, cocking an eyebrow and twisting his lips, gloating already.

“If I answer that, there’ll be no living with you,” Thor sighed, then pulled the blankets over their heads to seal them up in a world of their own.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> please don't comment or repost.


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